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August 21

Trisyllabic laxing

Anyone know of an example for the school → scholar shift? In our article I moved that pair to a section on disyllabic laxing, but now we lack an example for trisyllabic. — kwami (talk) 22:35, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

line → linear? or else incline → inclination? --Lambiam 01:43, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I meant for /uː/ ~ /ɒ/, as is lose ~ lost. I can't think of any which fit the trisyllabic pattern, and the fact that published descriptions keep using 'scholarly' (which is a trivial derivative of disyllabic 'scholar') suggests that perhaps there aren't any. — kwami (talk) 04:57, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Goose, gosling? Bazza (talk) 08:11, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's about tri-syllabic laxing, the /ɒ/ should be contained in the third-to-last syllable. --Theurgist (talk) 08:44, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Theurgist: Thanks. Something new to learn! Bazza (talk) 08:55, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

True, but goose ~ gosling is an excellent example of disyllabic laxing. School ~ scholar is likely two distinct loan words, whereas goose ~ gosling are cognates, so I'm changing the example. (Still looking for a trisyllabic example, though.) — kwami (talk) 09:44, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That's made my day :-), but I may still be learning how this works. introduce ~ introductory (or the repro- equivalents) has the wrong lax vowel (ʌ) for your request, but is not included as (uː→ʌ) in the table in the article. Does this mean it's not an example of trisyllabic laxing? Bazza (talk) 12:17, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A Greco-Latin written "o" vowel letter does not commonly become pronounced as a vowel sound [u:] except under unusual circumstances ("school" an early loanword not borrowed through French, "zoo" a spelling pronunciation of an abbreviation), so the odds would seem to be against you... AnonMoos (talk) 12:30, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Examples of failed /uː/ ~ /ɒ/ laxing (trisyllabic constipation?): nude ~ nudity; fume ~ fumigate; fury ~ furious. --Lambiam 15:54, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam -- Those words all have or had (depending on which English dialect) a [ju:] pronounciation (not simple [u:]) and are spelled with the letter "u", and so are not too relevant to the issue under discussion... AnonMoos (talk) 19:53, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Another tempting but wrong case is prove ~ providence. Unfortunately, they're not even cognate. I don't think you're going to find an example of trisyllabic laxing (as opposed to other processes) for the reason AnonMoos gave. --ColinFine (talk) 20:06, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, all. I found a source that this is no longer a productive alternation, so I think I'll just leave it at that. — kwami (talk) 22:41, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Lose to Lost clearly isn't an example; the o in lost has the darker sound of caught, not the short o sound of cot. Georgia guy (talk) 23:37, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on your variant of English's adherence to the cot–caught merger. In my own, the "o" in "cot" and "lost" is nice and short. Bazza (talk) 08:20, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

August 24

Chinese translation request

From a request in WP-DE: Can anybody possibly read what the label of this tea can says and what exactly the content of the can is? --Stilfehler (talk) 15:01, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is a type of oolong tea known as "Sparrow's Tongue" (雀舌). I've never had this variety, but Da Hong Pao is one of my favorites! The rest of the can is just branding. bibliomaniac 1 5 17:18, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much! --Stilfehler (talk) 18:41, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was looking at the thread on de.wiki using Google Translate and hope that answers things satisfactorily. Archwizard should be honored...he's gotten quite a valuable gift! bibliomaniac 1 5 20:29, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this was very helpful. In the German WP, I had a hard time finding an active user who can read Chinese, so I'm happy I asked here. Thanks again! --Stilfehler (talk) 20:49, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot, very helpful. Archwizard (talk) 08:12, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Just for interest: I tried to read the four characters top down, but I was not even able to recognize them. Could you tell me which characters that are and what it means? Thank you! --= (talk) 15:26, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

August 25

Sasana

I'm trying to figure out why Sasana is a redirect to England. I've read the note at Sasana which suggests it's an Irish word for England. Is that correct? All the pages that link to sasana look as though they should go to Śāsana, so I am inclined to change this to redirect to Śāsana.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 14:59, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I've changed the redirect back to what it originally was (prior to an edit in 2015). I don't see any reason for having these foreign language redirects. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:06, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I know, the Irish language word for England is, in fact, Sasana, so maybe a hatnote is required: See here. This is related to terms like Sasanach, which means "English" (as in ethnicity) and is cognate with Saxon.--Jayron 32 16:12, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that Sasana is not mentioned in England, so maybe the hatnote should redirect to Saxons#Celtic languages, where it is explained. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:14, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why we need any such hatnote. We don't normally do redirects from random foreign language terms to English terms, except when the topic in question is closely associated with the non-English language in question, which is not the case here. The fact that England is called Sasana in Irish is of no more relevance than that it is called Ingilterra, ʻEnelani, Uingereza or Yingguo in some other languages. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:26, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's only a redirect. Why does it matter what language it came from? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:31, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It was a redirect that conflicted with a much more pertinent, alternative redirect target (which in fact it had been pointing to earlier, and which was also the intended target of its existing incoming links). If it hadn't been for that, we wouldn't bother about it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:35, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is where disambiguation pages come in. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:15, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

But that's the whole point: Disambiguation pages (or hatnotes, for that matter) are only for things which, in and of themselves, would make for legitimate article titles or redirects. Random foreign terms just aren't that. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:50, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

August 26

Evolution

Is the Spanish spoken in South America the same as the Spanish spoken in Spain, or has this evolved over the centuries? One would assume that it has in the aspect that if we look at English from let say 300 years ago, it is very different from spoken English today. One would assume that a language developing over time naturally would do so differently in different parts of the world. I would therefore assume that Mexican Spanish and Chilean Spanish differ too. The same applies for French in Franceand that in Canada. Also, if my assumption is correct that there are subtle or overt differences between these, then why is English so uniform between the USA, Australia, South Africa and England? "If not the Queens English, it's just broken English". I note that Afrikaans and Dutch are dissimilar to such as extent that they can't really be understood by each other without careful attention, hence the hypothesis. So to clarify, are these so different that they can't be easily understood? Thanks

"A Spanish speaker from Madrid may have initial difficulty understanding Cuban or Argentine Spanish, just as an American does Australian or Scottish English, but that’s as far as the problem goes. One’s ear adjusts pretty quickly". The mutual intelligibility of Spanish dialects. Alansplodge (talk) 15:54, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note also that there is mutual intelligibility between many Romance languages. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe says that Spanish can be understood (or at least 57% of it) by French, Italian, Portuguese and even Romanian speakers (p.13). Alansplodge (talk) 16:04, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. Anecdotal evidence: with strong French (thanks largely to Astérix), rusty Esperanto, even rustier Latin, and such bits of Italian and Castilian that I happened to acquire casually, I have read articles in Catalan and Portuguese with some confidence that I understood them. —Tamfang (talk) 22:08, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Other contributors will know much more than me about the variation between different Spanish dialects and varieties, but I will venture to say that my Chilean Spanish is perfectly easily understood in Spain. Apart from vocabulary, the major difference I noticed when I sat my GCSEs and was tested on European Spanish, is the use of the informal second person plural, which was entirely absent from the language I learnt from my grandmother.

Although I'm not sure I agree with you that the various Englishes you refer to are so uniform as you imply, I would suggest that one reason why they have diverged less than you might be expecting (and no doubt one could think of many others) is that the Anglophone world has remained in more or less continuous contact by sea, and more recently by air, for centuries. To quote our article, "Divergent evolution is typically exhibited when two populations become separated by a geographic barrier...". This refers of course to the evolution of animals, but I submit that a similar principle applies to language – there simply hasn't been the necessary separation which might lead to more marked divergence. How such an approach would apply to the case of Dutch/Afrikaans is beyond my knowledge.

Our article Language change may be of interest to you, if you haven't already explored it. Quīsquīlliān (talk) 16:19, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Personal anecdote here, so not the same as actual data, but my experience confirms the sources that Alansplodge provided. Many years ago, attending graduate school in Chicago, I had a roommate from Colombia, and he tried to explain to me about the different Spanish dialects. He said that most of the South American dialects were fairly close to his Colombian dialect, and the difference seemed about as different as one could expect various dialects of Southern American English; i.e. some differences between say Georgia and Texas and Alabama, but still obviously closely related. He had particular disdain for Caribbean dialects, finding them the most difficult to understand, especially Puerto Rican Spanish, and he said that Castilian Spanish sounded stuffy and overly proper. But the impression I got was that all of those varieties of Spanish were certainly not of a wider variation than various English dialects. Wikipedia has an article titled Spanish dialects and varieties which states "The different dialects and accents do not block cross-understanding among the educated. Meanwhile, the basilects have diverged more." A basilect is a low-status dialect. In other words, the "standard" or "high register" varieties are generally fully understandable between the countries, while dialects associated with lower-socioeconomic status show wider variation or pretty much what you see in English. --Jayron 32 16:24, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I have friends in London who were unable to understand the dialogue in Rab C. Nesbitt, a sitcom set in Glasgow (I was able to translate because I had a Glaswegian grandmother). Alansplodge (talk) 19:28, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I mentioned here years ago that when I bought the CD of The Social Network, I started watching it but after 5 minutes I had to stop it, turn on the subtitles, then start again. It wasn't so much the dialect per se, though, since I've been watching American movies and TV most of my life. It was the speed with which they all spoke. A speed that, for me, totally cancelled out all understanding. It may as well have been Urdu or Welsh. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:59, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That's Aaron Sorkin more than American English. The director David Fincher shot it very much like a Thomas Schlamme-directed Aaron Sorkin work, with heavy use of walk and talk style and extremely fast, stylized dialogue. It's a trademark of the Sorkin style. --Jayron 32 12:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

He's welcome to it. There's no way I'm the only person who had this problem. What we had here was a huge failure to communicate. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:40, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've heard mention of efforts to codify a Neutral Spanish dialect for use in international media, but have not found solid information about it. —Tamfang (talk) 22:13, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

One relevant article is pluricentric language... -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:45, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We can take some liberty to consider languages as biological entities, in both fields, interaction is used as one of many parameters for defining the boundaries between distinct entities, in language mutual intelligibility is a common test for categorizing languages, so is reproduction with viable offspring in biology, it's worth noting that in both cases, the entities become more similar by sharing and adopting their differences. In biology, Allopatric speciation is a mode of speciation (branching from one into two species) that occurs when populations become geographically isolated from each other to an extent that prevents or interferes with gene flow, the allopatric event with spanish would be the Age of Discovery of the New World, in this sense this analysis pertains to English and Portuguese as well. Flow between populations wasn't prevented, just reduced, and it occurred without interruption over a large span of time, albeit with a clear direction which allows us to consider the European languages as closer to the common ancestor, precolumbine spanish, which we must of course consider to be extinct.

Our languages of course evolve over shorter timespans than do our bodies, so 400 years of total separation might have been enough for mutual intelligibility to be lost, therefore the reason spanish speakers are able to understand each other across continents, is because we have exercised that ability over the course of the years. This is different from considering whether the modern dialects understand pre-columbine spanish, as this would be a third extinct dialect, the answer to that different question is, again, yes most readers can understand pre-columbine texts, with some effort, on the third and fourth question of whether a modern Spain speaker or a modern Mexican speaker could understand a 15th century farmer, we can be certain that the speaker from Spain has better odds, but generally speaking a language is harder than reading it, due to the impossibility of empirically testing this, definite answers will be harder to come by.--TZubiri (talk) 04:45, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The better educated a population is the slower the language will evolve. If children learn their own language in a formal way in school then that will inhibit the drift of the language away from the current state. A thousand years ago Old English changed to Middle English in just two centuries, due to large numbers of immigrants arriving from Scandinavia who spoke Old Norse, which is very similar to Old English, but still different enough to cause the newcomers not be able to master Old English, and when you mix slightly different rules, they end up canceling each other out. See here for some details. Count Iblis (talk) 06:42, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Count Iblis -- we have the Middle English Creole hypothesis article, which has some problems (see the talkpage of that article). Iceland has had high literacy for centuries, which has kept Icelandic morphology conservative (but has done little to prevent a number of changes in pronunciation)... AnonMoos (talk) 11:02, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The important factor in the case of Iceland is that it is an island - i.e. isolated. That is why the language has changed little from Old Norse. For the same reason the language of Sardinia has changed little from Latin. Portugal is not an island but it has an extensive coastline and inland it is ringed by mountains. Hence the language is little changed from Latin. 2A00:23C0:7980:3F00:CDAD:6AF2:6034:DF10 (talk) 12:42, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is generally true. Language change tends to be correlated with contacts between population group; in broad strokes the more contact between more groups of speakers, the more a language community will change over time, and the more isolated a language community, the more conservative its language will be as it is passed down. There are several isolated communities on the east coast of the US who speak varieties of languages that are much closer to the varieties of Tudor and Stuart English that were spoken when those communities were settled than they are to any modern dialect on either side of the pond, groups like the Hoi Toiders in places like Ocracoke, North Carolina and Tangier, Virginia along isolated fishing communities in the Outer Banks and Chesapeake Bay. --Jayron 32 14:54, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

common bilingualisms

We have List of languages by number of native speakers and List of languages by total number of speakers. But I wonder whether enough is known about bilingualism to rank pairs of languages by number of bilingual speakers. I imagine English/Spanish and Hindi/Telugu, for example, are high on the list. --Tamfang (talk) 22:25, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the problem is defining what is a distinct language. While something like English/Spanish bilingualism is a rather clear dividing line, the distinctions between languages, dialects, and registers aren't always very clear and determining if a person is bilingual is determining to what extent the two types of speech they can switch between represent distinct languages or merely varieties of the same language. --Jayron 32 13:05, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

s/are/is not/, perhaps? —Tamfang (talk) 02:58, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. So corrected. Some people are bilingual. I'm not even semilingual. Good catch. --Jayron 32 14:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

August 27

Swedish question

I'm almost ashamed to ask this, given that I understand Swedish quite well but not perfectly, as I'm not a native Swedish speaker.

But anyway, here we go. I saw a cartoon on Facebook where a pensioner on a stroller finds himself on a pedestrian walkway completely blocked with improperly parked foot pedal cycles (the ones you kick instead of pedal). He says: "Tacka vet jag mördar-sniglar!" I know that mördar-sniglar means "murderer snails" but I'm having trouble parsing the sentence as a whole. What does it exactly mean? JIP | Talk 00:38, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The cartoon, by Robert Nyberg, can be seen here. The caption of the cartoon, "De nya mördarsniglarna", means "The new killer snails", which appears to refer to these carelessly strewn kick scooters. Swedish mördarsnigel is a common name for the Spanish slug. (The hyphen in the text balloon is not part of the orthography, but inserted because of a line break.) On Wiktionary the entry tacka lists tacka vet jag as a "related term", but the latter is still a red link. This may be because this idiom is hard to translate. Here it is translated as "I prefer", with a footnote stating:

"Tacka vet jag" is quite hard to translate for it means many things. Literally it means "Thank(fully) I know of

. You might translate it here as, "I fondly remember", or, "Give me those old-time" (as in "Give Me That Old Time Religion"). Presumably the rollator operator used to already have a hard time navigating the old-time snails, but deems these new "snails" worse. --Lambiam 08:54, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Spanish, French, German

For an English speaking person, which language is easiest to learn, if he learns alone without teacher using online resources? And he will appear for language test after two years. -- 10:07, 27 August 2020 Landdolphin

Please sign your posts using 4 tildes (~).

Please define your terms. What do you mean, exactly, by "learn a language"? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:46, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If you don't have any background in any of the three, I would guess Spanish -- French has some difficult sounds (front rounded vowels, uvular "r") and a spelling system with a rather indirect relationship to the spoken language. German has front rounded vowels and some complex grammar (verb prefixes which sometimes detach from the verb, case distinctions in articles and determiners, and complex word-order rules)... AnonMoos (talk) 10:50, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Language acquisition is not an on/off state but scales in different ways for reading, writing, listening, and speaking (and even these things can be broken down into cross categories such as extensive vocabulary vs circumlocution). For example, my spoken Spanish is limited to "me gustaria dos chiles poblanos y un mojito" and I can only catch a vague gist if a Spanish speaker addresses me as if I'm wearing a disability helmet. However, I can occasionally write simple sentences with a dictionary and generally make heads or tales of a text (and the longer the better, actually). If you don't have a teacher, nor anyone to constantly practice with, your speaking and listening are going to suck (and hell, mine do and I took Spanish for three semesters at uni). If you don't regularly engage in output, your speaking and writing are going to suck (¿Quién tiene dos pulgares y no habilidad? ¡Este chico!). The only online sources that are going to fix this are... teachers! Even if you're just Skyping someone to practice and they're not giving you deliberate lessons, they're still teaching you.

Also, English speakers aren't a monolithic entity. Due simply to accidental exposure, someone living in the United States (especially in the southwest) might have a much easier time learning Spanish than someone in Canada (who would have an easier time learning French). Ian.thomson (talk) 11:19, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

An issue to consider is also the availability of online resources. Otherwise Scots may be the easiest, due to the grammatical similarity and high overlap in lexicon, but online "Teach yourself Scots" resources are scarce and spotty. The extreme regularity of the grammar of Sranan Tongo (as well as English having been its main lexifier) also make it very easy to learn – but again, hardly any online resources. --Lambiam 12:30, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Be careful with Scots! It may not be what you think it is. In the last few days, it has been discovered that most of the articles on Scots Wikipedia were written in mangled English by an editor who doesn't speak Scots, which was widely reported in the news. See this discussion at MetaWiki. —Naddruf (talk ~ contribs) 21:51, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think the same advice applies to the Sranan Tongo Wikipedia. Much of it is written in a travesty of that language, with many totally made up neologisms for concepts for which established words exist, strange grammar and inexplicably weird spellings, such as a ubiquitous nyunr instead of the very common word nyun. Who knows how many other small Wikipedias with very few active editors (or in this case even none) are similarly compromised? (And rumour has it that a majority of editors at the Latin Wikipedia are not native speakers either!) --Lambiam 00:16, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

When pondering closeness to nearby learning resources and speakers, Spanish if you live in USA/Canada, and German/French if you live in the UK. When pondering closeness between languages, English and German are closer, they both descend from the same West Germanic branch, while French and Spanish are closer to each other, descending from the same Western Romance branch. In summary, German or Spanish if you live in North America, German if you live in the UK.--TZubiri (talk) 01:54, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

August 28

Sic semper tyrannis

John Wilkes Booth is said to have shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" after killing Abraham Lincoln. But how did he pronounce it? JIP | Talk 00:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Semper" would have stress on the first syllable, and "Tyrannis" on the middle syllable. Otherwise it would depend on whether he used the Traditional English pronunciation of Latin or a more historically accurate one (called "Erasmian" when it comes to Greek, not sure if there's a similar term for Latin...) AnonMoos (talk) 05:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It may plausibly have sounded somewhat like /sɪk ˈsɛmpɚ taɪˈɹæ.nɪs/ But Booth may have had a somewhat non-rhotic accent from his English mother, or perhaps instead extrrravagantly rolled r's as a common affectation among old-school stage actors. Or a 19th-century Baltimore accent from where he grew up, learned Latin and began his theatrical career, so this suggested phonetic description must be interpreted very broadly. --Lambiam 11:23, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The term would be "Church Latin". To Catholic priests and religious Latin is a living language and the pronunciation follows the vernacular at the time the Church was founded. 2A00:23C0:7980:3F00:CDAD:6AF2:6034:DF10 (talk) 12:51, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)Children learn accents from their peers rather than their parents, see [1] for one example, but this is a consistent and well documented phenomenon which starts at a surprisingly young age. If Booth had an accent, it was probably more closely aligned to the community he was raised in rather than that of either of his parents. Unless he had an affectation he was deliberately using. --Jayron 32 12:52, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]